antiblorb (blorb + anticanon)

Not like antivenom or antifascism, which are not venom or fascism, but like antimatter or antipaladins, which are wonky types of paladins or matter.

The blorb levels of truth are:

1. explicit GM notes, and if none exist,
   
2. procedures like random tables for generating truths flagged by the GM in advance, and if none exist,
   
3. GM fiat

Antiblorb is quite similar, actually, following the hierarchy:

1. explicit GM notes and overwise established truths, and if none exist
2. if the facts would be known to PCs, established player headcanon, and if that does not exist or is inapplicable,
   
3. if the facts would already by known to PCs, player fiat, and if that is not applicable,
4. procedures like random tables for generating truths flagged by the GM in advance, and if none exist,
5. GM fiat

Note that antiblorb is similar to blorb when PCs are literally or metaphorically "in the dungeon" investigating something outside of their zone of familiarity, allowing for the strength of blorb (genuine exploration and mystery.) When they're "in the tavern," literally or metaphorically, it's similar to and exploits the power of anticanon (making worldbuilding into a team sport.)

1HD = 2 + 1d4

Marcia writes with airtight logic that 1 HD = 4 hp. But hit dice are meant to be rolled!

From my perspective, the ideal is to split out unbloodied and bloodied tracks. The unbloodied track is a known quantity; it represents the minimum level of how much a thing of that order can take. The bloodied track is a mid-combat surprise: you've tested this guy's mettle, and here's how tough he really is.

 This has a couple of benefits from my perspective:

It's an anti-railroading device, much like reaction and morale rolls. If you're mechanically transparent and let the players roll for opponents' bloodied hp, you've removed any worry that players will think you're fudging for dramatic convenience; if for the sake of logistical convenience you want to say "yeah I think you've pretty decisively won this fight we can montage you winning the rest rather than play it out" you can do so from a position of credibility. 

It's a cinch to calculate, either starting with monster HD or monster HP. Starting with HD in an old-school system, you can have unbloodied equal to 2xHD, and then bloodied equal to 1d4xHD (I recommend a single d4, the result of which is multiplied by HD.) If you have a suggested HP, then you can go with bloodied as equal to half default HP and bloodied equal to d(default HP) - round to nearest at-hand polyhedron (good use for Zocchi dice) or take 1d10 and multiply by closest multiple of 10. (So 35 hp becomes 17 ub, d30x3 bl.)

It's a bit gamey but diegetically plausible, as sometimes you don't know how tough someone is until they're battle-tested. 

It avoids the traditional scaling issue of traditional rolled HD, in that as you roll more and more dice as HD goes up, swinginess goes down and there's a lot of calculation to do.

It builds in pacing and surprise into combat, as suddenly things may turn out to be much tougher or easier than expected. Strategies may have to be adjusted.

bad metagaming is always the GM's fault

Harsh words but I'll stand by them. 

Metagaming is when the player knowledge affects character behavior over and above what character knowledge would afford. Bad metagaming is when we don't want this, which depends on lots of things: most obviously how trad vs. storygamey we want to be, and even in very trad games there will be metagamey elements that arise, most often for the sake of smoothing things out and getting to the interesting bits:

• leaning in to cooperation with other player characters, even when the characters would have more reason to conflict
• speeding up/slowing down action because you know the IRL clock on the game session is going to end
• choosing to steal the jewels at night rather than by winning over the prince at the ball because you (the player) like heists more than social adventures

or whatever. [1]

The classical instance of bad metagaming is something like: the party are attacked by trolls, but the players have cleverly read the Monster Manual and know that trolls can't regenerate from fire, and so break out flame even though their characters are benighted innocents who are unaware of such things. [2] Players, don't beat yourself up over this; GMs, this scenario is your fault and you should have got gud. This is on you because:

1. Players don't have control over whether their own knowledge propagates into character action.
2. You DO have control over the fictional situation, and hence whether player knowledge corresponds to it. 

Within a trad or simulationist context metagaming tends to be bad because it takes people out of actor stance, but when players are "playing dumb," the damage is already done. You are the one who decided that trolls die from fire and acid damage, not the Monster Manual. The Monster Manual just suggested it to you, just like it suggested it to your players. 

Does fire and acid damage route around troll regeneration? Do trolls regenerate at all? Make those decisions in the context of the fact that the players have been suggested that this is so. The easiest assumption to make, the one that requires the least work from you and players, is that meme D&D (or whatever folk knowledge associated with the kinds of books players know you're borrowing from) is within the folk knowledge of the setting. Communicate that this is the case and that this folk knowledge is in many cases correct and in some cases incorrect. Then you can decide whether trolls regenerate and what they don't regenerate against, and when PCs encounter trolls (or creatures described similarly to them) they can start with flame as a starting hypothesis and proceed empirically from there, experiencing neither dissonance nor betrayal regardless of the result.

[1] I think most of these kinds of good trad metagaming are best thought of as costs rather than good in themselves, insofar as they take you out of an intended actor stance and into author stance, as opposed to the kind of metagaming one can do from author stance, like deciding that your character who has decided to seduce the prince also finds him absolutely revolting because you (the player) think that would be dramatic and funny.

[2] Maybe this scenario is good at your table; substitute another scenario, then.

review: Barbie (2023)

You’ve probably heard that Gerwig’s Barbie is pretty good. It is! It’s a collection of well-executed gags in service to a thoughtful meditation on feminism and the role of the Barbie doll in American culture the metaphysics of TTRPGs. Spoilers ahead but honestly this isn’t the sort of film where spoilers don’t spoil.

Barbie is a player character Barbie girl who lives in a published campaign setting Barbie world, which is a sort of sterile Platonic realm teleologically oriented towards killing monsters and leveling up being professionally accomplished while hanging out on the beach. But alas! Barbie starts experiencing inbleed malfunction from the IRL human playing with her the IRL human playing with her. She goes on a Hero's Journey (tedious in any story that isn't a meditation on stock stories, which this is) to encounter an almost Plotinian series of her creators: the game designer inventor of Barbie, Ruth Handler; a loveably evil and stupid toy manufacturer; a particular human who plays with a particular Barbie, Gloria. Everybody finds that the effects of their intended interventions between the real world and Barbieland are not what they intended: Ruth's carefully crafted fantasy universe enables objectification rather than empowerment in the real world; Ken "ruins" the carefully crafted world by importing IRL cultural ideas; Mattel literally cannot put Barbie "back in the box;” Gloria, a middle-aged mom plays with Barbie “wrong” by projecting middle-aged thoughts about mortality and depression onto her.

Obviously, Gerwig isn’t here to talk about TTRPGs, but she is interested in formal questions about play with toys more generally, whose Henadic procession of creators mirrors somewhat her own medium of film: writer, director but also production studio, actor. These questions occupy a relatively small portion of discourse about the film, because understandably people want to discuss gender more than they want to discuss art formalism, but while there is some examination of Barbie’s effect on the real world, very little changes there; all of the action in the film is about how the real world intrudes on Barbie and Barbieworld, ultimately to her/their enrichment and depth. (One of the best little scenes involves Barbie sitting mindfully on a park bench, overwhelmed by sonder - a kind of reality-deepening play any of us can engage in at any time.) All of the chaos and unintended bleed is good and doesn’t necessarily change the world, but does let us make toys into a vehicle for greater feeling when we’re willing to be both cringe and perverse and inject our feelings into them.

This I think this can be read as a salvo in the recent discourse around the locus of control between design and play; worries about designer “mind control” are always going to be overblown because play is always enriched by these perverse moves. 

Socially Appropriate Noesis

Your SAN score hovers between 100 and 0. Being exposed to traumatic experiences and supernatural weird shit can bring it down. Watch out! If it goes low enough, you'll have a lot of difficulty getting through the day.

The typical SAN score is somewhere between 75 and 95. People who put special effort into ignoring unpleasant facts, or who don’t really try to build a world model so much as memorize “what the right thing to do” is in a wide variety of situations, or who have a high level of epistemic learned helplessness may have SAN scores in the high 90s. People who are both curious enough to be weird and privileged enough to have a safety net, like tenured professors or eccentric billionaires, may be high-functioning despite SAN between 50 and 80, but this is difficult for most people.

SAN is a presence, not the absence of something. Low SAN can mark someone off, while high SAN is unremarkable, so it seems like the absence of something called “insanity.” Nope! SAN is a specific set of beliefs and instincts that are built up with great effort and maintained with what is considerable inconvenience, because having them is so useful. (Having low SAN doesn’t automatically result in something that shows up in the DSM, except in the sense that literally everything corresponds to something  in the DSM, but the DSM is part of a universal cultural project of trying to keep people at high SAN and policing those who do not.)

The specific beliefs that are part of high SAN vary from culture to culture, but in general they include things like:

• the world makes sense
• everything will work out in the end
• bad people will be punished and the good will be rewarded
• but if good people suffer there’s an unknown good reason for it
• I am one of the good people
• causality flows from past to future
• the adults know what they’re doing
• I can trust my senses most of the time
• my emotions are mostly appropriate responses to my situation
• people have meaningful subjective experiences and laundry machines don’t 

and so on. Continuing with the relationship between SAN and our society’s concept of a mental disorder, if you believe in the rituals of mental health enough to go through them as an enthusiastic-ish participant, you probably already have a decent SAN and the rituals will work for placebonic reasons. (The rituals may also work for reasons adverted on the tin, like changing your brain chemistry or exposing you to evidence that high-SAN beliefs are true.)

SAN is reduced by exposure to evidence that its percepts are false. SAN loss is thus an expression of rationality, not irrationality. If you meet an honest-to-goodness ghost that is evidence, among other things, that

• you can’t trust your senses
• science doesn’t work
• elite common sense is wrong
• etc

At low SAN, you can’t rule out many possibilities, and you especially can’t rule out many bad possibilities. This is mostly bad. If your SAN is really high you may come off as shallow, naive, and robotic, and maybe you’d benefit from an Ayahuasca trip, but if you’re a paranormal investigator in a modern horror setting or whatever, you want all the SAN you can hold onto.

SAN loss should largely be a choice, albeit often the best of several bad choices. Exposure to horrid mysteries should largely grant the option to simply suppress the information, forgoing the option to acknowledge or reason from or use it in any way. This healthy suppression is what most people do most of the time (the average person IS exposed to all sorts of stuff that would drive them mad reasonably often, if they thought obsessively about it, which they quite reasonably don’t.) But if you’re a humble flapper investigating Yog-Sothoth or whatever, maybe you need to acknowledge some of that. Pick your demons wisely.

revisionist terminology: first/second/third-party material

First-party material is anything oneself comes up with. (Like first person.)

Second-party material is anything someone else at the gaming table comes up with. (It's first-party to them, of course.)

Third-party material is anything someone not at the table comes up with: random blogs, publicly traded Seattle corporations, an angel gives you golden tablets inscribed with elfgame combat rules, whatever.

This is probably like DVORAK in that it's not worth the switching costs. But it's how I think of it in my head, and certainly the right mindset for DIY elfgames.

blood, time, hunger, clean hands, and fast friends (on setting stakes)

(See also: mechanics for resource management, ICI doctrine, impact, attack the character sheet.)

Some crude steotypes you hear sometimes:

1. "OSR play is all bean-counting rations and torches and encumbrance"
2. "PbtA games are great if everyone is bringing the energy to make it sing, but if just one person is out of gas it falls flat"
3. "Modern D&D is just rolling dice until one is high enough that the DM shows you the next scene"
   

Some stereotypes are the opposite of true, but these all hint at something useful. And I think this has to do with the variety of consequences that the different styles work to make relevant. Failing forward and success at a cost are at the core of PbtA, and they lead to the "partial success" range being very fun if the player facing them has the creative energy to make them relevant. No resources is worth tracking in modern D&D other than spell slots and hit points, and you probably won't run out of hit points either.

For old-school play in the sense I care about, you don’t need death around every corner, or bean-counting encumbrance and gold, or strictly-kept time records (although I like some of those too.) But things like these allow the referee to attach costs to actions in a way that presents players with meaningful tradeoffs. Schematically, the conversational loop that undergirds play operates something like:

1. The referee describes a situation.
2. The player consider a response.
3. The referee communicates whether there is significant danger in this response, and if there is not, how long it would take and what other resources it might consume. ("Yeah, it looks like it would take about a dungeon round to hack your way through this wooden door") If there is no danger and no relevant time or resources to consume, they simply do the action.
   
4. If there is significant danger, then the referee either communicates that danger ("so you'll all be scaling this cliff in the storm, I'll have you roll a check at DC 20 each; for each failure you'll have to drop a backpack, and if everybody fails you fall to your doooooms") or notes where mysterious danger at least might be relevant ("okay, so to be clear, you're reading aloud from the tome, even though you don't know what it means, right?")
5. Players decide to go through with the action or consider another.
6. If they go through, referee describes consequences and hence the new situation.

Something (for instance, time) can't be a cost if it doesn't matter. The same applies to every other type of consequence:

• injury and risk of death
• encumbrance
• money
  
• rations 
• stress and mental health
  
• relationship with your patron deity
• relationship with various factions
• "are we the baddies?"
  

These don't necessarily need to be tracked quantitatively, and indeed many suffer from this. If PCs' moral status is supposed to matter, I don't think it requires a Humanity track like in Vampire and may often suffer for it (though I think in that particular game it works for it, in that it simply forces you to make a note of it when you hurt people, and the threshold for making that note of it gets more extreme as you descend further into being a monster.) But it does require that characters care about being good, and that they're thrown into situations that demand either compromise or lateral thinking. "Task: punch one million Nazis" might be an interesting challenge in any number of ways, but it's not morally interesting. 

People sometimes associate aspects of WotC-era D&D they don't like with streaming, but while to be fair tracking gold and encumbrance makes for extremely bad radio, I can think of at least one game that makes for great radio because of how obvious the risks and tradeoffs are when players face a decision: Delta Green. In DG agents have to worry about

• time (bad shit is going to keep happening or get worse without your solving it, otherwise you wouldn't have been called in)
• injury and death
• mental stress, especially how exposure to certain kinds of otherwise useful information
• the affect of all this on their relationships
• whether any particular pretty fucked-up action is morally justified by the harms they're trying to prevent

is Delta Green old-school? Whatever, it's dramatic because of (when played right) tough decision density.

Advice I'd consider generalizable: 

1. have a couple of different things you can reliably count on as a relevant cost, and keep track of it at the level of granularity and using the tools that make sense
   
2. vary up a bit what costs are relevant for any given session; give play variety by putting players in situations where time is suddenly rich where they're used to it being tight, or where rations suddenly matter even if they weren't worth tracking before
3. get your players primed to point out costs; this can align with their moment-to-moment interests if they know that you'll sometimes let them succeed at something they otherwise failed at if they propose a cost that makes sense.